A Taste for Rabbit Read online

Elton explained the game. “Rules change,” he said. “Three moves. Change back.”

  “But changing rules means no rules,” Harry said, beginning to be interested. “Why not just call it what it is — cheating?”

  Elton shook his head. “Not cheating. Players choose.”

  “You mean they decide whether to change the rules or not?”

  “Yes. Sometimes.”

  The badger finished talking and then walked over to the pot. He lifted the lid and sniffed the bubbling contents. “Not bad,” he said.

  He returned to the checkerboard and set up the pieces. Harry was intrigued. A game with rules that kept changing? Sometimes? How would you win a game like that?

  They played in silence and Harry watched Elton closely, looking for clues. At one point, when Elton jumped several of Harry’s pieces, including an especially interesting feathered pine cone, Harry said, “Wait! When I did that you said, ‘Not allowed.’ What’s going on?”

  Elton growled, “Badger rules. Like mice. Hard to swallow.” He glanced at Harry and walked away to check the pot in the hearth again. “Saw you,” he said, without turning around.

  Damn! “Look, Elton,” he began, “I did find a few mice, but only a few. It didn’t seem worth it to bring them back.”

  “Understood.”

  Harry stomped to the door and stood on the porch, watching the sky darken and breathing in the smell of imminent snow. He reached down, packed a snowball with his paws, and threw it in the direction of the frozen lake. My life was so much simpler when I was alone. He threw another snowball. Well, it can be that way again. He went inside.

  Elton had taken the pot from the hearth and placed it on the floor near the checkerboard. The contents bubbled. He offered Harry a large ladle-like spoon from his pack and took another one for himself. “Share,” Elton said.

  “Are you sure? As you so tactfully pointed out, I have already eaten.”

  “Not tactful,” Elton said. “Honest.” His eyes behind his spectacles became icy. “Share,” he said again, more firmly. “Badgers share.”

  Harry gave in. There was no point arguing with a badger. Besides, it wasn’t as if there had been a huge quantity of mice. “If you insist.”

  In a few minutes, Elton scraped the bottom of the pot, then turned it upside down and drank from it, after first offering it to Harry, who declined. A neat pile of vole bones lay on the floor beside Elton; Harry’s were scattered. Elton put the all the bones in the pot and brought it to the hearth.

  Harry felt the need to change the subject. “So, Elton,” he said, “do you have a family?”

  Elton turned. “Family?”

  “Yes. A mate? Brothers and sisters? Children?”

  Elton walked back to where Harry was sitting, cross-legged, on the floor. “Brother only.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Like?” Elton looked puzzled. “Badger. Like me.”

  “No, I mean, what kind of creature is he?”

  Elton sat down opposite Harry. “Older. Smarter. Bigger. Faster.” Elton seemed to be thinking. “Big talker.”

  “For a badger, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you get along?”

  “Get along?”

  “Do you like him? Do you get along? Do you trust him?”

  Elton didn’t answer right away. “At first, no. Jealous.”

  “Jealous? Why?”

  “Older. Smarter. Bigger. Faster.”

  “What happened?”

  Elton stretched out his short legs in their worn, brown boots.

  “Hard to say. You?”

  “Yes,” Harry replied. “Unfortunately, I do have a brother.”

  “Get along?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Younger. Phonier. Richer. Meaner. “Hard to say.”

  The two sat silently for a moment. “I don’t know what your plans are,” Harry said, changing the subject again, “but I’d like to move on to the fortifications today. I could get a few hours in before dark.”

  Elton turned to him. “Go tomorrow,” he said. “Snow soon.”

  “Snow every day.”

  “Go tomorrow.”

  “I don’t agree. I’ll leave now and hope to make some progress by tomorrow morning.” He got up to put his things together.

  “Play again,” Elton said, gesturing to the checkerboard. “You win, leave now. I win, go together. Tomorrow.”

  Will I never be rid of him? Harry thought. “All right. But if I win, I leave by myself, now. If you win, we’ll see.”

  “See?”

  “Yes.”

  “I win. Go together,” Elton said, giving Harry that stubborn stare.

  “Fine, fine.” Let’s get this over with, Harry thought. I can still catch a few hours of daylight.

  Elton reset the board.

  It was early evening before Harry won his first game of badger checkers. He had watched through six games, losing each one, as Elton attacked (“Ho!”), set traps (“Ho!”), took his playing pieces (“Ho!”), returned his playing pieces (“Ho!”), and defeated him by a wide margin (“Ho!”).

  Harry hated to lose. Today, perhaps because of the mice, he especially hated to lose to Elton. “Another game,” he’d said after his first one, giving up on his plans. Elton had defeated him in more ways than one.

  In the beginning, Harry drummed impatiently on the floor as Elton spent a lot of time preparing for each move. Finally, by the end of the seventh game, Harry understood. The winning strategy was to play conventionally for a while, and then, when your opponent least expected it, change the rules. Of course, when both players did that the game became almost impossible to follow. Bluffing, making distracting noises and gestures, and keeping a straight face while making errors (change of rules? or a deliberate effort to throw your opponent off track?) were techniques Elton had clearly mastered.

  In one game, Harry noticed that Elton yawned loudly and scratched his head just before he made an unexpected rules change. A few times, Elton ignored an obvious opportunity and allowed Harry to advance into dangerous territory. No sooner was Harry feeling elated and confident about his success than Elton’s next move decimated his defense. Toward the end of the seventh game, there were only a few pieces left on the board and Harry was cornered. It was Elton’s move; Harry began to cough — a dry, hacking cough that seemed to come from deep in his chest. He doubled over and his eyes teared.

  “Problem?” Elton asked, looking up with concern.

  “I’m fine,” Harry managed to choke out. “Sorry.”

  Elton made his move.

  With a triumphant shout, Harry jumped his feathered pine cone over Elton’s bundle of twigs.

  “Ho! Double ho! I won!” After six straight humiliating defeats, it felt very, very good. He clapped his paws, stood up, and stretched.

  Elton held out a paw and they shook. “Learn fast.”

  “Yes,” Harry said with a satisfied smile. “I do.”

  He walked to the window. It was dark, and the faint light from the cabin window illuminated the ground. Harry could see the snow, falling in thick, fat flakes, straight down. There was no wind. The tracks he’d made returning from the cabin had filled up with snow; the path he and Elton had made to the door had already disappeared. He turned back to the fire.

  Elton sat on the lower bunk mattress, his nightcap already on his head. “Harry,” he said as he fell back on the mattress. “Good coughing.” In a few minutes, he was asleep on the bottom bunk, buzzing.

  Harry picked up the checker pieces and moved them slowly around the board. Badger checkers. He thought about inventing Harry the Fox checkers. There would be rules, but they would never change: go my own way, depend on no one, eat when I can, get revenge on my brother. A good game — a game I can win.

  He yawned. Sleep tempted him: The cabin was still warm; the hot food was comforting in his stomach; the brief moment of cold he’d felt looking out at the snow had made him shiver. The
falling snow began to blow against the windows, and Harry could sense the temperature dropping.

  He put the checker pieces and the board near Elton’s pack, climbed up to the top bunk, and pulled his coat and the blanket around him. The fire slowly died; the cabin grew dark.

  He thought about the “message” from the moochy-poochy stones. Dead end. What could that mean? That it was futile to try to discover the connection between Gerard and Isaac? What path was he following that could lead to nowhere? I knew there was a reason I hated those things, he thought. They make no sense, and it’s a waste of time to try to figure them out. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

  Six months earlier, on a late spring morning, Gerard the weasel had awakened earlier than usual. He lay in bed for a moment, breathing in the fragrant air that drifted through the open window. Spring! A time for poets. What was that line from The Wanderer? “Now the … something … morning / Glows upon the misty hills / And shows her flowered apron to the waiting sky.” Lovely, he thought. That ermine really knew how to write. But you’d think having declaimed those lines a hundred times or more, I could remember the entire speech. He’d begun to notice that essential words and phrases from his acting past were vanishing from his memory like … like … dew in the sunshine, as a matter of fact. He reached for a pencil and paper near his bed and jotted down his inspiration. A poem was coming — he could feel it.

  He had dressed hastily, sipped some cold tea he’d left on the table from the night before, and started out on his regular morning walk. The spring air was fresh and sweet and already warm enough so that he regretted his jacket, and the sun through the newly leafed trees created a pleasing light in the woods on either side of the trail that led into Wildwood Forest. There was an eager, innocent green to the larches, he thought, and the evergreens were tipped — no, gilded — with the pale yellow of new growth.

  He walked at a leisurely pace on the familiar path, feeling a surge of well-being. His most recent project had been gratifyingly successful: A prosperous rat had asked him to investigate and report on the activities of a competitor. “No sabotage, please, and no destruction,” the rat had said from behind his enormous desk. “I just want information.”

  Gerard had spent a week studying at the Foxboro Public Library and had picked up enough construction jargon to present himself as a consultant. “I’ll need access to the company’s files, of course,” he’d said to Howard, the competitor, a genial older rat with a doting wife and no children, and the rat had obliged.

  “I’ve been looking for a fellow like you,” Howard had said. “Someone I can trust. A rarity in this world.”

  Gerard had been invited to the rat’s home and had eaten several spectacularly good meals amid much laughter and warm conviviality. He’d made his report within a month and had been handsomely paid.

  The older rat would shortly be out of business.

  Now I can relax a bit and actually write some poetry, he thought, instead of just contemplating the possibilities. He reached into his jacket pocket, found a pencil and a small pad, and sat down on a damp tree stump at the side of the trail. He stared at the paper and jotted a few notes: dappled light, gilded trees … I walk among the dappled trees / The morning sun, the … something … breeze. That might work. He folded the paper neatly, put it back into his pocket, and reached for a cigarette, thinking he’d return to the poem later. For now, it was more pleasant to breathe the air, listen to the birds, and soak up the warm sun.

  In a short while he heard an odd, irregular step approaching on the path. Coming toward him was a fox walking with the help of a cane, which, Gerard could see as he came closer, was made of expensive mahogany and tipped in silver. The fox was handsome for his species, with a powerful upper body, and well dressed. There was a look of cunning — he was a fox, after all — and confident authority that told Gerard, who prided himself on his ability to read character with little evidence, that this fox was accustomed to having his way.

  The fox stopped in front of him and asked, “Are you Gerard? My name is Isaac — perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

  Of course! The Managing Director of Foxboro, known for his shady dealings and for his ability to manipulate the press, although the former had never been proved. Now Gerard understood the attitude of authority, the aura of power and privilege. He tamped out the cigarette in the damp soil and rubbed it with his boot. He stood. “Yes, I’m Gerard, and of course I know who you are.”

  Isaac nodded curtly. “I need to talk to you. Can we walk?”

  “Certainly.” Gerard returned to the path and walked on Isaac’s left, the side with the cane.

  “Do you mind?” Isaac said with some irritation, gesturing.

  Gerard moved to his other side. “Sorry.” So the fox was sensitive about his disability. Clearly his left leg was not as strong as his right. An injury? A childhood illness, perhaps?

  “What can I do for you?” Gerard asked after a moment of silence.

  Isaac did not respond immediately.

  Gerard looked around. Although he sensed a business proposition in the offing, he almost wished it weren’t so. The world was beautiful right now, and he wanted to soak it up with all his senses.

  “I know the kind of work you do,” Isaac said suddenly. “I need someone like yourself to handle a delicate matter for me. But I must know I can trust you.” He stopped walking and turned to face Gerard, looking him squarely in the eye. “Well?”

  “Ah,” said Gerard, thinking of the older rat. “Someone to trust,” he said smoothly. “A rarity in the world, don’t you agree?”

  Isaac sighed impatiently. “Obviously. That’s why I asked.”

  “Trust is my business, or shall I say it’s my single most effective tool of the trade. I wouldn’t have achieved my reputation and my success if I hadn’t been trustworthy.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you want references.”

  “I don’t need them,” Isaac said, continuing on the path. “I’ll pay well,” he added. “Generously.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll tell you this much for now,” Isaac said as he turned to leave. “I’ve been contacted, in the flesh, by a rabbit who offered an … arrangement.”

  “What? A rabbit? That’s impossible!” Gerard exclaimed.

  Isaac looked at him with narrowed eyes. “No, it’s not.” It was a statement not to be argued with. “My place, tomorrow evening. Do not breathe a word of this to anyone. I have ways of finding out if you do.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a business card. “Here. Shall we say midnight? That way I can be sure you won’t be seen.” He disappeared around a turn of the trail.

  Gerard stood watching him with his mouth agape.

  Contacted by a rabbit who talked? Was the Managing Director insane? The conversation was so disturbing for so many reasons that he found he could no longer focus on the beautiful morning. He walked for a while on the path, but tripped several times and once actually fell, scraping his elbow. He picked himself up and looked around. Had anyone seen? The woods were silent. I need to go home, he thought finally. He turned around and quickly walked back to his house and went inside, locking the door.

  Gerard dropped into his easy chair and mopped his brow with a silken handkerchief. If it was true that Isaac Fox had actually met a rabbit who could speak … He tried to imagine what that would be like, talking to one’s food and having it respond. It would be as if a piece of cheese or a bunch of grapes or a vole had stood up on one’s plate and said good morning. What next? Talking furniture? Conversations with trees? It was ridiculous. The fox must be hallucinating.

  He walked to the small ice chest that sat in the corner of his kitchen and opened it up, moving the straw out of the way to uncover the contents: a bat and a dozen frogs, each still whole and neatly folded around itself like a small package, stiff and silent. The bat stared at him with open, sightless eyes, its sharp little teeth bared in a frozen death-smile. Beneath the bat and the frogs were layers of frozen vole and squi
rrel, a number of vegetable sandwiches, several eggs, frozen berries, a snake, and dozens of tender earthworms hardened into a glistening, frosty mass, like a misshapen ball of thick, brown string.

  Gerard looked at the bat. “Hello,” he whispered, and immediately felt the utter fool. He covered the ice with the straw and slammed the chest closed.

  He returned to his chair and lit another cigarette. I haven’t eaten rabbit in ages. Food of all sorts had been so plentiful in Foxboro he’d never given it any thought, until just recently, when he’d come across a particularly tempting recipe in an old cookbook. Rabbit! he’d thought. It’s been years since I’ve tasted rabbit. But there were none to be found in the Foxboro markets.

  He’d spoken to his local grocer, who specialized in delicacies of particular interest to the small weasel population that lived on the outskirts of the city. “My dear fellow,” Gerard had said to the slightly seedy weasel with bushy eyebrows and a scar on his chin. “Surely it’s not possible that the rabbit supply has vanished forever. You seem to be the kind of weasel who could get his paws on anything. Isn’t there something you can do? Price is no object,” he added, thinking about the recipe and his sudden craving for braised rabbit with fresh mushrooms and garlic.

  The proprietor, wearing a plaid cap and a soiled green apron, wiped his paws on his front and stepped from behind the counter. “There ain’t no rabbits nowhere,” he said emphatically. “There ain’t been no stinking rabbits for a long time, except maybe inside that old fortress on the other side of Wildwood. But even the black market ain’t never been able to get none. Believe me, I’ve tried,” he added, with a nudge of his elbow into Gerard’s shoulder, from which Gerard slightly recoiled. “There ain’t no one like me, Martin, for finding your illegal liquor or your hard-to-get imported tobacco.” He winked. “About the rabbits, though — it ain’t just us, sir, believe you me. Nobody ain’t got no rabbit, nowhere. Nobody never had no rabbit since I can’t remember. Nobody can’t never get no rabbit, neither.”

  “Did you say tobacco?”

  They completed the transaction in a small, filthy back room that also, apparently, served as Martin’s living quarters. Gerard, dismayed by the weasel’s grammar, appalled by his accommodations, pleased with his respectful tone, and delighted to find a source for his much-sought-after sassafras tobacco leaves, had put the matter of rabbit availability and the tempting recipe out of mind.